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This article examines the factors that influence the development of educational policies and practices designed to ameliorate the achievement gap in relatively affluent school districts. To provide a context for understanding the issues surrounding efforts to promote educational equity, the article begins by describing initiatives undertaken by schools in the recently established Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN). The remainder of the article draws on research collected from a 4-year study carried out at Berkeley High School (BHS) to illustrate how racial disparities in academic outcomes are influenced by the structure of opportunity within schools and how efforts to address inequities often become politicized. The goal is to use the case of BHS to show how political factors complicate efforts to reduce racial disparities in student achievement and to make it clear why political strategies, rather than educational strategies alone, are needed to respond to the racial achievement gap.

Two giants in the fields of education, psychology, and equity-A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera-reveal bold truths about the achievement gap and provide you with a promising framework focused on key factors drawn from successful schools. Here's your opportunity to understand why some school districts are making more progress than others, to make sure you're focused on what really works, and to build the capacity of high-performance, high-poverty schools

This article explores the challenges that have made the pursuit of school integration difficult in the contemporary era. Using court records and newspaper archives, we explore how a New York City school desegregation order came to be seen as "unnecessary," "unfair," and "anachronistic," claims that seem to deny the salience of race in one of the most segregated school systems in the nation. In 1974, Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island became the first New York City school to desegregate under federal district court order. Three decades later, Mark Twain was a highly desirable magnet school under a court-mandated desegregation plan that left students across the city competing fiercely for admissions. In 2007, an immigrant parent from India successfully sued New York City, claiming his daughter was passed over in favor of white students who scored lower on the city's selective school screening test but were admitted in the name of maintaining the 1974 court-mandated racial balance. We argue that Mark Twain's story vividly illustrates not only the importance of demographic change in school desegregation policy but also the evolution of racial discourse and the conceptions of the public good in the post–civil rights era.

In this article we explore recent history to uncover the role that public engagement has played in the effort to reform America's urban schools. In the place of narratives that focus on elite actors (foundations, unions, corporations, etc.), we focus on the role of local stakeholders. Specifically, we look to how the changing political context (policy agendas and governance structures) of urban school systems has shifted possibilities for communities to participate in determining the direction of reform efforts in urban school systems. Through interviews and archival research, we examine the case of a single parent-led advocacy organization, Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools. Established in 1980 and remaining active until the late 1990s, Parents United developed a broad-based vision of educational equity and had a significant impact on the local public school system during that time. We show that in the current political and social context of education reform, communities may derive important lessons from Parents United while also devising new strategies for public engagement.